CompTIA Data+ study guide
CompTIA Data+ · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
CompTIA Data+ is described by CompTIA as the only entry-level, vendor-neutral, hands-on data analytics certification on the market, aimed at professionals tasked with developing and promoting data-driven business decision-making. It suits people starting or formalizing a data analysis career, and also people who work with data regularly without specializing in it - analysts in finance, operations, marketing, or business roles who need to clean, query, and present data credibly. The CompTIA Data+ study guide has 5 sections and about 1,632 words.
01Data Concepts and Environments
Start with the shape of the data. Structured data lives in rows and columns with a defined schema; semi-structured data such as JSON or XML has tags but flexible structure; unstructured data such as text, images, and audio has no predefined model.
332 words, about 2 min02Data Mining
Data mining is the process of finding patterns in large data sets and turning them into models. The standard lifecycle is CRISP-DM : business understanding, data understanding, data preparation, modeling, evaluation, and deployment.
300 words, about 2 min03Data Analysis
Analysis answers four kinds of questions: descriptive (what happened), diagnostic (why it happened), predictive (what will happen), and prescriptive (what should we do). Candidates must also be fluent in summary statistics.
334 words, about 2 min04Data Visualization
Visualization is about matching a chart to a question and an audience. For comparison across categories, use a bar chart; for change over time, use a line chart; for distribution, use a histogram or box plot; for the relationship between two numeric variables, use a scatter plot; for part-to-whole with few slices, use a pie or stacked bar, but prefer bar charts when there are many categories.
344 words, about 2 min05Data Governance, Quality, and Controls
Governance is the system of decision rights and accountability for data. Know the roles: the data owner is accountable for a domain and sets policy; the data steward implements standards and resolves quality issues day to day; the data custodian operates the technical storage and backups.
322 words, about 2 min